There are more than a few things about abortion that don't get reported. The press doesn't make a big deal about the number of abortions performed every day (4,400), or whether fetuses feel pain (they do), or the growing strength of the infanticide lobby (as articulated by Peter Singer). They don't tell you that child abuse has gone up 600 percent since Roe v. Wade, or that the abortion industry is worth $90 billion plus. The facts leak out, though. I've unearthed a few secrets that I think, in all fairness, well-informed Americans have a right to know.*

Post-Abortion Stress Syndrome
Monica Lewinsky might have seemed pretty happy-go-lucky about the abortion she had in between the phases of her affair with the president, but a lot of post-abortive women aren't so cheerful. In fact, women who have had abortions suffer so much that there's now a name for what they go through: Post-Abortion Stress Syndrome (variously PASS or just PAS; also classified under Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD).

Standard PTSD is a psychological dysfunction that often comes from threats or experiences of physical injury, sexual violation, and the witnessing of or participating in a violent death. It's the same as the "shell-shock" that veterans go through. The trauma makes the victim's defense mechanisms soar out of control. They take on a life of their own and cause alterations in personality and behavior. In technical terms, the results are hyper-arousal (extreme sensitivity, nervous agitation, sleeplessness, constant alert to danger); intrusion (the bad experience breaks into ordinary life, often in the form of nightmares) and constriction (inability to reach out to others and express emotions). The trauma in PASS comes from the pressure to abort from boyfriends or family, the anxiety over choosing the abortion, the physical pain of the procedure (despite anesthesia!) and, most obviously, guilt once the abortion has been performed. Some women have even said that an abortion feels like rape — a sexual violation performed by a complete stranger causing extraordinary pain. PASS is particularly virulent in women who have had chemical abortions, because these abortions produce a complete, perfect and dead child.

One study found that at least 19 percent of women who have had abortions suffer from some form of PASS. In all likelihood, the rate is actually higher, because these studies have high drop-out rates — and generally from the women who suffer the most intensely. Dr. Wanda Franz, testifying before a congressional hearing on the impact of abortion in March of 1989, summarized the syndrome by saying that women "report horrible nightmares of children calling them from trash cans, of body parts and of blood ... they re-experienced it [the abortion] with terrible psychological pain ... they feel worthless and victimized because they failed at the most natural of human activities — the role of being a mother."

It doesn't stop there. There are reports of sexual dysfunction, both of extreme revulsion to sex and extreme promiscuity. Many women contemplate suicide and a fair number of those attempt it; studies in England and Finland identify a definite link between abortion and suicide. Smoking, drinking and drug use all increase after abortions, as do eating disorders. Post-abortive women are more prone to divorce and chronic relationship problems; they find it difficult to bond with their children born after the abortion and many simply continue the pattern — by now, 45 percent of all abortions are repeat abortions. All these expressions of PASS can show up from minutes after the abortion to decades later. Often it takes five to ten years of denial before the memories and emotions begin to surface uncontrollably.

The turmoil of PASS is probably best seen in the dreams of those suffering from it. The site afterabortion.org catalogs a number of these dreams. Here's a fairly representative one:

My dream has been repeated so many times over the years ... I can wake myself up now. The dream starts in an old three-story house. Sometimes I'm in the back of the house, sometimes I'm just driving up, sometimes I am already in the house. Big, white, clean, hardwood floors, beautifully decorated. I always think that it is a good dream. Then I start up the beautiful winding stairs. I am apprehensive but I still go up the stairs. I finally make it to the room on the third floor. The room is completely empty. There is only a white box under the window across the room. I walk into the room. I am never alone, someone is always with me. That part is ironic considering the complete feelings of isolation I have had all these years. Anyway, I walk to the box. Sometimes I hear a baby crying and I quickly open the box only to find it empty. Other times I have opened the box to find baby clothes. Other times I have found a dead baby. Other times I have found my old bloody clothes. I stand over the box crying and the intensity wakes me up.

Abortion is not an like an appendectomy as this dream demonstrates. It's not a body part that's being removed; it's another human being.

The Abortion-Breast Cancer Link
Even if a woman's heart and mind heal after abortion, whether through forgetfulness or repentance, her body will never forget what she did. That's because "induced abortion is the premature, willful and violent penetration of a closed and safeguarded system — a system in which nearly every cell, tissue and organ of a woman's reproductive system has been specially transformed and activated to carry out the function of sustaining and nourishing the developing child. Not surprisingly, any violation of the integrity of that system can lead to serious complications." Many of the physical side effects are predictable: hemorrhage, infections, sterility and death — even in this age of "safe" legalized abortion.

But one particular side effect has not only been under-reported by the press: it's been actively suppressed. It's the link between abortion and breast cancer. Dr. Patricia Hartge wrote in the January 1997 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that a study in Denmark "definitively" proved that there was no link whatsoever between induced abortion and increased risk of breast cancer. Dr. Joel Brind, a professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College of the City University of New York, has some reason to doubt her. Waging what is in effect a one-man war against the media's obfuscation of the facts, Brind, with some colleagues, examined every single one of the 23 studies on abortion and breast cancer from 1957 to the present, and he found an overall 30 percent risk increase. (The Denmark study was riddled with methodological errors — a fact that Hartge failed to mention.) That is usually enough to make medical experts anxious and outspoken, but here they have been conspicuously silent. This is rather odd, because medically speaking, an increase in the risk of breast cancer following abortion makes sense. A terminated pregnancy means overexposure to estrogen, and excess estrogen is one of the main contributors to breast cancer. But this is unacceptable logic. Case in point: A pro-life group decided to fund an advertising campaign in mass transit stations in Washington, Philadelphia, and other major cities after another study by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found a 50 percent increase in breast cancer risk after abortion. Days after the advertisements were posted, an order came from the Assistant Secretary of Health to remove them. If the posters said that smoking increased breast cancer risk by 50 percent, would they have been removed? Probably not.

The fact is that in passing judgment on the lives of their babies, women who choose to abort are often passing judgment on their own lives as well. The risk is even worse for African-American women, who are 4.7 times as likely to get breast cancer after the age of 50 if they've had an abortion.

Racism
And that's the third secret. Abortion is racist. It has been ever since Margaret Sanger plotted to shrink the black population in this country by convincing blacks to limit their families through any means necessary, including contraception and abortion. Her Negro Project never reached any official status, but it may as well have. Since 1973, 10 million black babies have been aborted. (Don't forget that a black baby is black from the moment of conception — there's something the abortion activists don't want you to think about.) The whole U.S. black population is around 31 million. So what could have been 25 percent of black America is wiped out without a trace. Even though blacks make up only 12 percent of the nation's population, they account for 30 percent of its abortions. Wonder why? Maybe it’s because 78 percent of all abortion clinics — usually staffed by white health care professionals — are located in or near minority neighborhoods. And you thought lynchings were as bad as it got in this country. They pale in comparison to abortions. (If you don't believe me, click over to www.ohiolife.org/stats/lynch.htm and see for yourself.)

Equally stunning are the legal parallels between abortion in the 20th century and slavery in the 19th. The Supreme Court decided in the Dred Scott case of 1857 that black slaves are not people, but property, because they are not protected by the Constitution. Consider these statements from the Scott case: "The word 'citizen' in the Constitution does not embrace one of the Negro race." "The Declaration of Independence does not include slaves as part of the people." "Such provisions of the Constitution do not put it in the power of a single state to make out one of the Negro African race a citizen of the United States, and to endue him with the full rights of citizenship in every other state without their consent." "The enslaved African race was not intended to be included in, and formed no part of, the people who formed and adopted the Declaration of Independence." It doesn't take much imagination to see the same sick logic at work in Roe v. Wade. The fetus is not a person; it is not named in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution as part of the American community; the states are not allowed to decide for themselves how they're going to handle the issue. The slave was the owner's property, and at his disposal to keep or kill; the fetus is the mother's property, at her disposal to keep or kill. Abolitionists were criticized for imposing their morality on slave owners; pro-lifers are criticized for imposing their morality on abortion activists and doctors. Slavery was protected by law then; abortion is protected by law now.

Let us all pray that the abortion conflict doesn't end the way the slavery one did.

*These are the sources I used for the information in this article. There's plenty more to find at these sites, and I encourage you to examine the material for yourselves.

www.ohiolife.org
www.prolifeinfo.org www.euthanasia.com/blac k.html
www.urbancure.org www.maranatha.net/prose boro/aala.htm
www.nrlc.org
www.firstthings.com/ftissu es/ft9705/brind.html
www.abortionfacts.com